another first: cooking in Romania

It’s a time of Peace Corps firsts for us — the first night in our apartment, the first meal , our first interactions with neighbors and now a first I’ve been looking forward to — the first time I cooked in Romania.  For 11 weeks of training, our gazda cooked us breakfast and dinner and the ladies at school cooked us lunch.  So it has been almost 3 months since I stirred or boiled or seasoned or cooked or roasted or sauteed.  You get my drift.  And while for the first few days it was amazing to not have to do that for myself, I came to miss the fun of cooking and the control I had over our daily menu. 

So tonight, since we don’t have a fridge yet, we decided to go simple — pasta and tomato sauce with a bit of cheese. I indulged in tomato and cucumber salad.  Tastiness and fun and completely autonomous.  Supertare.

It looks a bit like dogfood, with it being in silver bowls. But it was warm tasty  gazda freedom dumped into a silver dogfood-like bowl. Tomorrow we embark on another poor-man classic — Romanian ramen (with an assortment of veggies for me).  And hopefully, crossing our fingers and toes, we’ll have a fridge tomorrow evening.  Then we can graduate to perishable food items.  Watch out, ma fac bucatereasa in Romania!!